national security maters

What’s deplorable is the two party system that encourages loyalty over reason. Both parties are sick, but in very different ways, and the right is having a severe episode right now.

The solution isn’t to try to convince everyone to vote for the lesser evil, but to show them how broken the system is and to demand an end to the two party system. That won’t fix everything, but it should at least give people a better way to express their preferences.

Woo! Don’t hesitate to ask for help, Linux users usually don’t bite. 😀

You can dual boot on pretty much whatever you have, though I recommend buying a separate drive for Linux for minimum headaches.

But yeah, I get it. Linux will be there when you’re ready.

How about this: I’ll offer installation support and free tech support for three months to the first 20 people that ask. Free of charge. I only have three conditions:

1. You pick from a handful of distros I’m willing to support - Debian, Fedora, openSUSE Leap
2. You donate any amount of money to any FOSS project or contribute something to a FOSS project
3. I reserve the right to not help get certain Windows software working, like anything Adobe

for money reasons

Should we tell them Linux is free? 😀

I like my personal cloud.

I get the sentiment, but I think Rust does a pretty decent job even in the prototyping phase. I’ll run snippets in Python or Lua, but that’s mostly for data mangling, like generating code from a data format or preparing test data.

So far it works pretty well.

It honestly depends on how you run things.

If everything is in containers, chances are you’re already getting the benefits of a firewall. For example, with podman or docker, you already explicitly expose ports, which is already a form of firewall. If you’re running things outside of containers, then yeah, I agree with you, there’s too much risk of something opening up a port you didn’t expect.

Everything I run is with podman, which exposes stuff with iptables rules. That’s the same thing a basic firewall does, so adding a firewall is superfluous unless you’re using it to do something else, like geoip filtering.

When in doubt, use a firewall. But depending on the setup, it could be unnecessary.

That’s kind of how I feel about EU4. I started w/ whatever the basic bundle was (base game + 2-3 DLC), and it was a ton of fun. Then when it got boring and I wanted more, I bought a couple more DLC when it was on sale. Rinse and repeat and now I have all of the DLC.

That’s how DLC should be. With Paradox games, you’re not paying for some stupid cosmetics, you are funding continued development to add fun new features to the game. Even if you don’t buy the DLC, you still get some nifty features in the free update.

So yeah, I think they do a good job w/ their DLC policy. Though I do wish they’d make older DLC free or incredibly cheap.

If you can’t see trump becoming a dictator

He’s like 80yo. He’s not going to. There’s a better chance that he has a heart attack.

And yeah, countries watch US politics closely, and they’re very unhappy with Trump’s stupid tariffs. His strategy seems to be to jack up tariffs to devalue the dollar a bit to make exports more attractive longer-term. He doesn’t want to annex Canada (though Canadians won’t hesitate to blow that up since there’s an election coming up next month), he doesn’t want to annex Greenland (but he probably wants some land for bases), and he doesn’t want much to do with anything south of the border. He wants to create lots of blue-collar jobs, because blue-collar workers for some reason have been shifting toward the Republican Party, and it’s his job to make the Republican Party more attractive.

I think the whole strategy is dangerous and stupid from an economics standpoint, but I don’t see it as fascist. It’s certainly isolationist and nationalist though, but I see zero indication that he’s interested in nationalizing anything. Maybe I’m wrong, but what I see is a lot of people who are mad because Trump doesn’t listen to them, so they spout alarmist nonsense.

That said, what Musk is doing is absolutely dangerous on another level entirely. He’s putting sensitive data into a format that could be fairly easily attacked by state actors. There’s a good reason we have data separated, and it’s not to intentionally make government ineffective, it’s largely following the principle of least privilege, and Musk is demolishing that. It’s incredibly dangerous, and I’m surprised he hasn’t gotten more pushback on it.

You can believe what you want, of course, but my read is that Trump is pursuing stupid economic policy in a crazy attempt to be remembered long-term as the guy that “fixed” the US economy, not trying to become a dictator. He wants to be remembered.

price at enterprise scale

Really? I thought that’s where big cloud services fleece customers the hardest… We use AWS at work, and I’m always surprised when I ask our devOPs how much we’re paying.

My understanding is they’re selling the “time is money” angle, where things work together well so you spend less time getting stuff set up.

Mozilla could probably survive with no additional funding, but they’d have to make some steep cuts. They have many millions in investments, enough to fund something like $20M indefinitely. That’s a lot lower than their current budget, but probably reasonable if they only needed to develop Firefox.

If Google funding is pulled entirely, they’ll likely find a search deal (e.g. Bing, DDG, etc), but it’ll be a lot less in royalties. However, if you look at their financials, they’re already putting a lot of the Google money away into investments, so they can certainly survive some cuts, provided they can something in the ballpark of what Google was offering.

They did, it’s often a CLI interface because it’s incredibly flexible. ffmpeg and imagemagick are quite easy for basic things.

Building a cross-platform GUI is a pain, and hosting a website costs money. Building a cross-platform CLI is incredibly easy, which is why it’s so popular.

Some of these tools have GUI frontends or alternatives, some don’t. The more niche you go, the harder it’ll be to find a reasonable GUI, and I consider PDF to JPEG pretty niche.

I don’t use Watchtower, but many images follow semver so setting the version to something that you feel comfortable with can help.

I use podman and set my images to auto-update, and I just use a tag that’s broad enough to probably not break stuff with the auto-updates.

Always wait a couple days before doing a big upgrade. These smaller projects tend to have patch releases pretty soon after a major release.

I use Actual Budget, and they have had a .1 release within a day or so of pretty much every release since I’ve been using them.

If you’re okay debugging some stuff, by all means, get the .0 right away and submit reports. But if you’re not going to do that, wait a couple days.

Wait, so saving a ton of money by using a language that reduces production bugs is now a bad thing?

I’m a senior sw engineer, and I don’t get paid because I know the vagueries of whatever language we’re using, I get paid because I can lead a team that solves problems. I don’t really care what the language is, but I do care that it’s relatively easy to on-board someone in case we have turnover or something.

I don’t know about you, but I’d rather be highly paid because I’m able to be really productive instead of highly paid because I’m literally the only shot the company has of fixing the bug.

You know what those web services do? I just click a button and it does what the button says. Why is that so hard?

There’s also a pretty big chance that they’ll do more than what the button says, like inject malware. That’s the whole point of the article.

the lack of OOP

Rust absolutely has OOP, that’s what Traits are for. It just doesn’t have classical inheritance, so you structure your patterns a bit differently.

That said, I lean more into functional-inspired style anyway, which tends to work pretty well w/ Rust.